Some nights, when Tom retires, he pretty muchimplodes: sucked back through nostril or an earinto the starry void that lies behindhis sleep-blanked visage… Through his body crouchcorpse-still, sunk in suspended animation,arid as freeze-dried food, his spirit findsno rest—a cosmonaut, it treks where no man(and even fewer women) have gone before:Tom’s Inner Self. Its never-ending mission:to seek out a new life—one not to bear,but live… Out of range now of Ground Control,and hurtling straight through Ursa Major, Tomaccelerates toward the inner wall—the universe’s limit—of his skull…

Of the fifteen poems that make up The Solipsist, there are these four poems about Tom Thomson, who perhaps couldn’t be a more foreign entity to an American audience, an American publisher, scattered through like teasers, or reminders of what may even be a combination of play and even compulsion. What brings him back to this painter of northern Ontario trees?

The Solipsist

Don’t be misled:that sea-song you hearwhen the shell’s at your ear?It’s all in your head.

That primordial tide—the slurp and salt-sloshof the brain’s briny wash—is on the inside.

truth be told, the whole place,everything that the eyecan take in, to the skyand beyond into space,

lives inside of your skull.When you set your sad headdown on Procrustes’ bed,you lay down the whole

universe. You reclineon the pillow: the cosmosgrows dim. The soft ghostin the squishy machine,

which the world is, retires.Someday it will expire.Then all will go silentand dark. For the moment,

however, the black-ness is just temporary.the planet you carrywill shortly swing back

from the far nether regions.and life will continue—but only within you.Which raises a question

that comes up again and again,as to whyGod would make ear and eyeto face outward, not in?